The New One by Evie Green

Posted on March 17, 2023 by pagesofjulia

Artificial intelligence, family troubles, love and aspiration combine for a delightfully suspenseful novel of secrets and betrayal.

In The New One, Evie Green (We Hear Voices) takes readers on a propulsive journey through grief, loss and secrets kept by those we love. This compelling novel will have readers up all night, following the tribulations of a struggling family offered a great gift–or possibly a curse.

Scarlett, the Trelawneys’ daughter, was a perfect angel–brilliant, beautiful, sweet, gifted–until she turned 13. She then becomes a terror: lying, staying out late at night, neglecting her schoolwork. “They had become a shouty family,” Green writes. “They all yelled at one another every day, and [Tamsyn] had no idea how to stop.” In near-future Cornwall, Scarlett’s parents, Tamsyn and Ed, are barely surviving in their humble camper: Ed works nights, and Tamsyn is up early mornings, “a peasant working in fields.” They subsist on stolen cauliflowers and rarely speak to each other (without shouting). Then tragedy strikes: Scarlett is left lying in a hospital bed in a coma, and Tamsyn fears she’ll never see her daughter conscious again. Just as their insurance runs out, they receive an offer that seems a mix of magic, miracle and horror: while a company called VitaNova rebuilds their daughter, the comatose Scarlett will receive the finest medical care, and her parents will be granted a fully funded fresh start in Geneva, Switzerland. Scarlett, now named Sophie (her middle name), is part human clone and part AI. She shares Scarlett’s memories and gifts, although with the traumatic past year erased, and has been augmented with a better knowledge of French and physics–and a perfect, innocent love for her parents.

Most of the story is told from Tamsyn’s point of view, with brief ventures into the perspectives of the other members of her family. Tamsyn is unsure of her manufactured daughter: this new one is so like her darling Scarlett that she’s impossible not to love. But Tamsyn grasps what Ed seems not to: their real, true, original daughter still lies unconscious, and every bond with Sophie represents a small betrayal.

The New One‘s creepy Stepford atmosphere is not to be underestimated. Readers can see what even Tamsyn cannot: Sophie understands more than she seems to, and her best interests and Scarlett’s may not align. Ed is keeping secrets. Geneva is a bit too perfect. Green’s (aka British author Emily Barr) prose is compulsively readable, her characters disarming and capable of great mystery. The New One is deliciously disturbing, engrossing and surprising at its every turn. This not-to-be-missed novel of family dynamics and what it really means to be human and to love is both pleasurably escapist and thought-provoking.

This review originally ran in the February 23, 2023 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 8 DVDs.

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Maximum Shelf: All the Sinners Bleed by S. A. Cosby

Posted on March 10, 2023 by pagesofjulia

Maximum Shelf is the weekly Shelf Awareness feature focusing on an upcoming title we love and believe will be a great handselling opportunity for booksellers everywhere. The features are written by our editors and reviewers and the publisher has helped support the issue.

This review was published by Shelf Awareness on February 13, 2023.

From S.A. Cosby, author of Blacktop Wasteland and Razorblade Tears, All the Sinners Bleed is a lushly dark mystery set in fictional Charon County in Southeastern Virginia and starring a Black sheriff in a town that’s not at all sure it’s ready for one. Recently elected Sheriff Titus Crown is out to right some wrongs from the inside: police corruption, racism and profiling, law enforcers living above the law. He’s also dodging a few traumas of his own. Having come home to Charon County means he gets to live with and help his aging father, but it also means he’s reminded of his beloved late mother. His brother lives in town but rarely comes around. Titus has a local girlfriend who’s very sweet and good for him, but sort of unremarkable; he has a sense he should love her more. He’s haunted by the events that ended his FBI career in Indiana. Running a small staff of deputies in a small Southern town has its own challenges, mostly manageable ones; he hopes to redeem himself in this way from wrongs only hinted at.

But then there’s a call about an active gunman at the high school in town. In minutes, Titus is looking at a popular teacher of decades shot to death in his classroom, and a young Black man killed by deputies while the school–and via their cell phone videos, the entire Internet–watched. Before Latrell Macdonald died, “with a wolf’s snout in his left hand and cradling a .30-30 like a newborn in the crook of his right arm,” he spoke of crimes that make Titus’s blood run cold. The ensuing investigation will crack Charon County wide open, and challenge to the core Titus’s plans to clean up his hometown and make amends for things that happened in Indiana.

Titus is no investigative slouch. “His instructors at the Academy had their own version of String Theory. The way they explained it, there were invisible strings that vibrated unseen in the liminal spaces between sunrise and secrets, between rumor, shadows, and lies. Strings that pulled all this together. All you had to do was find the seam and unravel it. Or rip it apart.” His years with the Bureau and training under his friend and mentor there give him an edge on profiling and pursuing an enemy who seems determined to toy with him. He finds the remains of badly tortured and murdered Black boys and girls; as he investigates, the body count only rises. An old girlfriend from his FBI years appears, asking to interview him for her crime podcast; his father pleads with him to come back to church. The Sons of the Confederacy are planning a march at the upcoming Fall Fest, and a strange story surfaces about a reclusive fire-and-brimstone snake-handling preacher. Increasingly distressed at his inability to keep his county safe, Titus is plagued by memories and the present evil attacking his home. On less and less sleep, he doggedly puts in work. “He went over a few other emails, reviewed the gas expense reports, checked the arrest log from last night, updated the Sheriff department’s social media page…. It felt strange to attend to the mundane and the profane at the same time but that was a defining aspect of the job.”

All the Sinners Bleed is noir with a particular American Southern twist. Place figures heavily. “The soil of Charon County, like most towns and counties in the South, was sown with generations of tears…. Blood and tears. Violence and mayhem. Love and hate. These were the rocks upon which the South was built.” Cosby deals in timely themes: returning home and reckoning with old wounds and crimes; the unsavory histories of the places we love; the legacies of Confederate statues, of slavery and racism; the darkness within all of us, even those playing the good guys; the role of police and policing. His prose is gruff, poetic but stark: “The clouds gathered like young men on a corner getting ready for a fight.” Titus has a code like that of Michael Connelly’s Detective Harry Bosch: “Either we all matter or no one matters. Everyone deserves to have someone speak for them.” He believes that something hard and mean dwells in every heart–and in a few, true evil. What has beset Charon County is not supernatural. It is merely the wages of sin (as his churchgoing neighbors might say), or the county’s bloody past coming back around. There is something of the lone gunslinger–damaged but virtuous–in Titus Crown, who stands against the worst elements of human nature. Like Cosby’s previous novels, All the Sinners Bleed is often grim, but it lands on a surprisingly hopeful, even joyful ending.

For fans of gritty, dark mysteries with an interest in the very real and contemporary demons of United States culture and history, Cosby’s work offers a sinister but satisfying voyage into the best and worst of returning home and starting fresh.

Rating: 7 sheep.

Come back Monday for my interview with Cosby.

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Liar, Dreamer, Thief by Maria Dong

Posted on November 28, 2022 by pagesofjulia

A young woman relies on ritual and fantasy to navigate her daily life–until the real world turns as bizarre as her worst fears.

Maria Dong’s debut novel, Liar, Dreamer, Thief, is a masterfully harrowing adventure for both reader and narrator. Katrina Kim is 24 years old and struggling to keep it together. She’s not great at her temp job at an insurance company; she has no real friends other than her mostly absent roommate; she relies on rituals involving geometry and prime numbers to feel safe from her shapeless, apparently irrational fears; she frequently imagines herself into the magical world of her favorite children’s book or the classical works of music she once performed. She argues that she is not stalking her coworker Kurt, but readers will suspect this may be semantics. She has $45 in her bank account and her parents haven’t spoken to her in years. Readers may assume Katrina is struggling with an undiagnosed mental illness, drawing endekagrams (a star polygon with 11 points) to help her get through the days–until she happens to watch Kurt jump off her favorite bridge, while shouting that it is all her fault.

Liar, Dreamer, Thief is punctuated with geometry lessons (the four stellations of the endekagram) and passages from the fantasy book that provides Katrina with her other, safer-feeling life, emphasizing these coping mechanisms as she embarks on an amateur (and poorly funded) investigation into Kurt’s disappearance. Her barely functional life goes further to pieces. Just as readers begin to worry that this narrator is not only unreliable but completely unstable, the clues shift slightly, and suddenly it appears that some of Katrina’s nastiest and most fantastical fears may be all too real.

This is a completely absorbing novel, both a terrifying whodunit thriller and a heart-wrenching drama about mental health, family, loneliness and moral relativism. Dong’s pacing and revelation of secrets is expert; beware staying up late to finish Katrina’s story in one go (and, perhaps, beware nightmares of the Mirror Man). Katrina makes some cringe-worthy choices while facing challenges both existential and mundane (clocking in on time in the cubical farm); she is an imperfect protagonist but disturbingly accessible, and indomitable even in her lowest moments. Liar, Dreamer, Thief excels at empathy and conveying the frustration of one’s own limitations, as Katrina wonders, “Does everyone in my orbit have a secret tragedy, just crawling underneath the surface?” Its mysteries swell toward a denouement that feels simultaneously unwieldy and inevitable. Probing those secrets may be mortally dangerous–or may be Katrina’s salvation.

This exceptional debut novel showcases relentless momentum, horrors, compassion and an unforgettable protagonist: not to be missed.

This review originally ran in the November 11, 2022 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 8 minutes.

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The Marsh Queen by Virginia Hartman

Posted on July 11, 2022 by pagesofjulia

Mystery, romance, conspiracy, family drama, natural history and art combine in this excursion into a decades-old suspicious death in the swamplands of northern Florida.

Loni was 12 years old when her beloved father headed into the northern Florida marsh in his johnboat and did not return. At 36, she is working her dream job as a natural history artist at the Smithsonian, ignoring her past and her remaining family as hard as she can, until her younger brother calls to insist she come home to help care for their mother. The Marsh Queen, Virginia Hartman’s fast-paced, compelling first novel, sees the prodigal daughter return to the swamps, the family she left behind, the mystery of her father’s death and the possibility of a fresh start.

“Daddy wasn’t just a visitor to the swamp, he was a part of the place.” Loni’s father, Boyd, was a Fish & Game officer, a fisherman, a devoted husband and father and a most unlikely suicide, although that was the rumored–and covered up–cause of his death. Loni was his usual companion in the swamps, uninterested in fishing but a passionate and talented illustrator of the birds they watched together. As an adult, she’s kept that passion, but grown distant from her brother and especially from her always-prickly mother, Ruth, now suffering from dementia. A serious gardener and herbalist, Ruth struggles with painful secrets long kept from her daughter. Loni’s leave of absence from the Smithsonian comes at an especially stressful time at work, and returning home is always painful; nothing about this trip feels right. But Loni canoes the swamps, discovers family secrets, investigates her father’s death, finds herself involved in fresh intrigues and dangers–and meets a handsome stranger. The Smithsonian, and leaving Florida behind, have always been central to Loni’s life plan, but as she sinks back into the quirks of family and home, she may just find a new way.

Hartman’s descriptive writing and clear passion for her subject are on best display when Loni immerses herself in the natural environment, in her art and in her memories of Boyd. In her contemporary relationships, Loni can be frustratingly obtuse and lacking in self-awareness. As the enigma around Boyd’s suspicious death gets more complex, the plotting can feel a little unwieldy. But the subversion of Loni’s expectations is frequently refreshing; a few secondary characters offer intriguing perspectives, and the novel’s framing details of Florida marshland, ornithology, museum work and fine art are expertly and beautifully drawn. The Marsh Queen is unwavering in its lush, finely detailed, appreciative portrayal of a distinctive natural setting, and ends on a redemptive, even inspirational note.

This review originally ran in the July 1, 2022 issue of Shelf Awareness for the Book Trade. To subscribe, click here.

Rating: 5 herons.

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Better Off Dead by Lee Child and Andrew Child

Posted on December 10, 2021 by pagesofjulia

Once could have been a fluke, but twice is solid. The Andrew Child continuation of the Lee Child empire will be okay.

Pretty classic building blocks here. Reacher’s just walking down a road in borderland Arizona when he comes across an unusual scene: an apparent car crash that isn’t what it looks like. (I won’t mention the opening chapter, which contains tricks of another sort.) Reacher tropes: a small town in the grips of an evil it wishes it could shake, but the locals don’t have the juice to deal with forces this great. Our hero stumbles into it, and feels sympathy for certain involved parties (and if one of them happens to be an attractive, super-competent woman of about his age, more’s the pity). Also, cue the timely issue of veteran suicide rates. There are some solid fight scenes and more trickery than I’m used to, actually, in terms of the plot itself: I appreciate this. Look, Reacher novels are familiar, even formulaic, but in the best ways, and in ways that still keep me page-turning and generally manage to surprise me. I was sure I saw the whodunit coming in this one and I was wrong. This remains a comfort read (despite the blood and guts); it’s like coming home. And I am just so terribly relieved that the Andrew Child continuation of the franchise seems to be going swimmingly.

Promotional copy claims that this one “will be the riskiest job of Reacher’s life,” to which I say, come on, have y’all read the previous 25 Reacher novels? It’s okay. I can’t wait for the next riskiest job of his life! Keep ’em coming.

Rating: 7 condoms.

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A Flicker in the Dark by Stacy Willingham

Posted on November 19, 2021 by pagesofjulia

Disclosure: I was sent an advanced review copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

Chloe Davis was twelve years old the summer that six teenaged girls went missing from her small hometown of Breaux Bridge, Louisiana. She found that the place she felt the safest was not so safe after all, when her father was arrested and pled guilty to six murders. As the twentieth anniversary of that summer approaches, we meet Chloe at age thirty-two. She is a clinical psychologist in Baton Rouge, recently engaged, and barely holding it together (she has a prescription pill problem, for one thing, abetted by Louisiana’s unusual system that allows psychologists to prescribe drugs). When a local teenager goes missing, and then another, she begins to lose the plot (no pun intended) while conducting her own highly amateur investigation.

I wanted to like it (not least because this book was originally assigned as a review for Shelf Awareness), but this thriller was not terribly successful for me. The writing was a little tired (Southern accent compared to molasses), and the characters frustratingly ill-suited to their professions: for a psychologist, Chloe is remarkably inexpert in human behavior; the police detective can’t stop interrupting his interview subject. I kind of lost it when the undergrad student said she’ll get her doctorate next, and then, hopefully, her master’s! (To be fair, let’s remember I got an advanced review copy – I surely hope this will be corrected before the final publication. But really.)

I finished it, but wish I hadn’t.

Rating: 4 red herrings.

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Lee Child shorts: “Public Transportation” and “Wet with Rain” (audio)

Posted on September 13, 2021 by pagesofjulia

“Public Transportation” was available from Audible as a standalone short (originally from the collection Phoenix Noir), and “Wet with Rain” comes from Exit Wounds: Nineteen Tales of Mystery from the Modern Masters of Crime. They were, I think, 13 and 28 minutes respectively, give or take. Just a few quick indulgences during a drive to the next county to my local bike shop.

Classic Child, so not much to report here, but in the best ways. “Public Transportation” offers a surprise twist and no serial characters. A cop is talking with a journalist about an old unsolved murder case; we get a fairly quick summary of the crime, the investigation (in hindsight, botched), and the problematic conclusion eventually settled on by the police department. “Wet with Rain” is also Reacher-free, but slightly more involved. We get a little less context, but eventually understand that two Americans with a certain agency have traveled to Ireland to run a secret operation, about which information is doled out slowly and out of order, so that we’re still putting things together even as they happen. Each of these stories represents a sort of puzzle – for the reader and for the players involved. Only one has a quick punch of a surprise; the other is more of a slow burn. And, again, neither involves our hero Reacher. But each serves as a good example of Child’s skill with intrigue, detail, and apparently effortless storytelling (which actually may be the hardest kind), as well as a certain dark side of human nature. I enjoyed both as quick jaunts, and would love to have access to more of the same: quick, punchy stories by authors I know I love. My lifestyle doesn’t support longer audiobooks these days. Look for more podcast reviews to come, I guess…

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“Drive” by James S. A. Corey

Posted on August 2, 2021 by pagesofjulia

Another short from one of my favorites series, “Drive” briefly profiles an inventor and his invention, which we’ve been aware of as a sort of fact-of-life technology in the rest of The Expanse: here is Solomon Epstein, and his Epstein drive. We meet Solomon en media res, mid-experiment, as his improved drive turns out to work but also threaten his life. In this timeline, he struggles to save himself, while interspliced scenes show how he got here: glimpses of who he was, in particular with the woman who became his wife. It’s awfully moving, actually, a very fine, clipped view of a human with no villain to him (rare in this fictional world). I am again impressed with Corey’s skills, and I can’t wait to find more of this world, the expanse that appears in the final line of this lovely, sad, stand-alone story. Definitely recommend.

Rating: 8 bits of colored glass.

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Before the Ruins by Victoria Gosling (audio)

Posted on July 19, 2021 by pagesofjulia

On a recent cross-country drive, I lifted this year’s ban on audiobooks, obviously. This one took me two days of driving – a much more favorable pace at which to take in an audiobook, especially one involving suspense. Before the Ruins isn’t lightning-paced – it’s not that kind of thriller – but there was a steady building of tension.

Andy’s feeling pretty safely distant from her own past when she gets a phone call from the mother of her childhood best friend, Peter, saying that he’s gone missing. She hasn’t seen Peter in six months or so. They’ve grown apart. Asked to look for him, though, she finds herself drawn into the events of their youth. Andy and Peter were part of a close-knit foursome, with Em and Andy’s boyfriend Marcus, then joined by an outsider fifth, David, during the fateful summer that they were 18 and 19 years old. The events of that summer were followed by a nasty winter a few years later, in which everything changed. Now Andy finds herself pulled back to the old manor estate where it all went down, back when she was a disadvantaged kid with an alcoholic single mom, quick to fight and slow to trust. Perhaps less has changed than she’s realized.

The novel slips back and forth in time, flashing back to the summer of Andy’s late teens and the winter of her early twenties, and back to the present, when she is nearing 40, finally financially secure but personally unmoored. Searching for Peter means reopening old wounds that never healed, and reconnecting with people she hasn’t missed.

In its actual events, the story often left me just a little disappointed, because the conflicts felt so unremarkable: young people, hormones, sex, hurt feelings. It sometimes felt like a lot of dramatic trappings for fairly humdrum activity. The word for this one is definitely atmospheric – driven not by plot but by feeling, and somewhat less so by character. I was reminded, at its best moments, of Tana French. In the final denouement, there are indeed surprises, but it’s the sense of foreboding, the magic of place (that old manor estate, and certain locations in Italy and France late in the book), and the mystery of character that carry this novel. We only get Andy’s perspective, and because of Andy’s trauma, her self-deceit, her constant bid to reinvent herself, and her caginess, we remain unclear on much of her own internal workings; certainly the other characters are enigmas. The slow reveal of each friend’s motives, what they knew and didn’t know, makes for the most interesting mystery of this thriller.

The audio production by Kristin Atherton is lovely, with voices and accents and reinforcement of that all-important atmosphere. I definitely recommend this format.

Final verdict? Not the most masterful thriller I’ve ever encountered, but absorbing and entertaining, and did surprise me at its end. Worth the time.

Rating: 7 sodden-looking sheep.

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“The Butcher of Anderson Station” by James S. A. Corey

Posted on July 12, 2021 by pagesofjulia

Just a quickie here: this short story establishes the history of Fred Johnson, aka the Butcher of Anderson Station, in The Expanse universe. It only makes me want more from this series, of course. The story handles two timelines. In one, Colonel Fred Johnson is ordered to retake the captured Anderson Station, and he does so, making what appears to be the wisest military decision along the way. Then he gets some new information. In a parallel story that takes place later, the OPA’s Anderson Dawes wants to talk about it with Fred. The story cuts back and forth between the two. By the end of this quick installment (36 pages, I’m told, in print – I’ve got an ebook version), we see the Fred Johnson that we’ll meet in the bulk of The Expanse. Dawes is also a recurring character; the rest (those central to the novels) are absent here, but it’s absolutely the story of Johnson himself, so supporting characters are mostly extraneous.

This story has it all: space jargon, tough decisions and moral quandaries, interesting characters and rich world-building. It whets the appetite nicely and I’ll be looking for more Expanse, as ever.

Rating: 8 seams.

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